The Rockabye Contract, page 9
I nodded. “An old trick. We used it in the Dominican Republic. If big trouble is ahead, create a diversion, a bogeyman. Then when the storm comes, rush to the OAS and point a trembling finger at this new threat to hemispheric solidarity. I would guess that Malo has ordered at least ten thousand of his most loyal citizens to join Angel’s Communist outfit. The government presses are probably printing their party cards now.”
“Two,” said André. “Late this afternoon, the freighter Phaedre, Greek ownership and Liberian Registry, requested a pilot and tugs, to enter Cap Hispaniola’s harbor. She had to wait, but is now standing in, maybe already tied up. Cap Hispaniola was not a scheduled stop for her.”
“Oh? You think the Joey-toys from the Schleuter Factory may be aboard?”
“I have no certainty of it, Joe. But the harbor master has already issued orders that Phaedre be furnished stevedore crews as soon as her hatch covers are off. They will take off her cargo by working all night. There has not been such an order issued in Cap Hispaniola for several years, I’m told. I take this factor of urgency to mean that she is loaded with armaments, ammo, or the toys General Malo seems to value so highly …”
There was a frosting pitcher of sangria on the mahogany table beside my bed, and I poured two tall glasses of blood-colored punch and took one to André.
“Where is Phaedre out of, and what have been her ports of call?” I asked. André shook his head; he didn’t know, but had cabled for the information two hours ago. I sat on the side of the bed, cradling the frosting drink.
Outside, in the garden below my second-story bedroom window, Truscott was having some kind of fête, and I heard a woman laugh. I hoped it was Truscott’s wife, whom I had not seen, and that she had forgiven me for killing her dog.
“André,” I asked. “You’ve been a great help. Do you know anything I don’t know? I mean, Malo bought the toys and stopped production on them. He has perverted them, both by installation as a vaudou idol and by remachining at least one so that it became a weapon. Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Falaise.
“All right, old friend. I believe you. But you can bet your illustrious ass and all its fixtures that somebody, perhaps only at the very top of my agency, does know. They don’t pay my fee, André, unless two factors are present. One, that the danger is real and considerable, and second, that it is nearly too late. Comprenez?
“Yes.”
“Okay. Do you know anything about this silly girl that I don’t?”
“I have seen her once in my life, the night I picked you both up at the stage door of the Palladium, in London. I had previously been sent a dossier on her past, about her missing father and Hispaniolan background, but was specifically instructed not to discuss it with you.”
I grunted, stood up, and began to dress, putting on a dark, long-sleeved sport shirt, dark slacks, socks and shoes. Into one pocket of the sport shirt, I dropped a stick of black facial-and-body makeup. The same kind I had used in Burma, while prowling the aerodrome of the renegade Chinese division. I had the devout wish that it would serve me as well in Hispaniola.
Below my bedroom windows, the garden party was breaking up, and I walked over and watched the participants shaking hands with Minister Truscott and his wife, under the colorful Japanese lanterns. The lanterns dappled the departing guests as they passed, volubly, out the garden gate.
“You are sure,” I asked, turning away from the window, “that the infamous Major Johnny Matar will be at El Cerro tonight?”
“No,” said Falaise. “I never said that. I said that if he follows his pattern, he will be there. This afternoon, he delivered today’s virgin to the Presidential Palace at four o’clock. When that is done, he usually drives out to his estancia, El Cerro. However, if anything unusual detains him, he stays in town. He has a house here, and an office in the Palace. Phaedre’s arrival might keep him in town.”
“Sure. But your people have worked the files in his office and the town house, and found nothing. So I’m going to prowl El Cerro, and I want him there when I do. There must be, somewhere, a record and perhaps a reason why General Malo has invested in these toys. And Johnny Matar, as chief of intelligence, must have the record near him.”
“Perhaps,” said Falaise, and I laughed.
“You like watching me get in tight, don’t you, André?”
The Frenchman sipped at his sangria, but did not answer. I got the holstered automatic pistol from underneath my pillow and jammed it inside my belt, while he watched.
“You’ll keep in touch with what’s happening aboard the Phaedre, won’t you, André?”
“I have four men stationed down in the harbor now. As soon as you leave, I’ll go down myself.”
“Good!” I said, and turned toward the door. When I had my hand on the knob, I half turned. “I know what kind of a scorpion’s nest El Cerro is, how it is guarded, and how many of the important political executions have been carried out there. If I don’t make it, André, will you grieve for me?”
“Certainement!”the Frenchman said. “For at least half an hour.”
“Thank you.” I said, and went down the back stairs of the Legation and got into the waiting car.
Chapter 22
El Cerro was an enormous hacienda built on the top of the most remote headland to the west of Cap Hispaniola. It was structured into the rocky promontory so skillfully that it blended into the high landscape, and from the gate of its front entrance to the house itself was a distance of nearly two miles, through a heavily forested tract. Falaise had reported that in addition to the electrified fence, sentries were always posted at intervals of a hundred yards.
Not all these sentries were patriots, however, and in an hour the car delivered me to a lonely spot short of the gate. We had driven for several miles without headlights, on the way up, and my Hispaniolan driver got out and groped his way to the fence but did not touch it. A shadowy figure carrying a rifle appeared on the other side of the fence, and the two conversed in low tones. While I was waiting, I smeared my face and hands with the black makeup.
The driver came back and whispered that the current would be off the fence in five minutes, but not for long. I told him to get the car near it, and he drove off the road, nearly snapping his springs. Standing on top of the car, I was nearly level with the triple-stranded arch of the barbed wire. Nothing happened when I tossed the length of wire I was carrying against the fence strands, so I leaned over and snipped them with the wire cutters.
The tautly strung barbed wire went zinging apart, and I put one rubber-soled shoe on the next firm strand, and levered off it inside the estate. The sentry was nowhere in sight. I could not see the long hacienda, but its lights illuminated the pine stand overhead. I stood still for a few minutes, until my night vision had adjusted, and then struck out toward the top of the headland.
A hedgerow of stunted firs, blown out of symmetry by the constant wind off the sea, blocked my way at the top. Beyond them, on three sides, was a lawned and gardened area leading up to the three-story villa. On the sea side, stratified rock outcroppings led to a precipice over the beach. Through the northwest sector of the manicured lawn, a curving drive led up to the house, and around the other side. The gatehouse to the estate was out of sight, two miles down the sloping hillside. There were no lights in the lower floors, but up on the balconied third level, the windows of two rooms were lighted up.
I lay under the twisted firs for half an hour, but could spot no sentries, guards, servants, or see any activity in the house. Then I went across the lawn to the rock ledges on the sea side, and hoisted myself up and into an open, darkened window. Outside, as I lay waiting and listening on a waxed hardwood floor, the wind kept sighing and fretting at the trees, sometimes slamming them into the side of the house.
There was a pale glow across the polished floor in the room to my right, and I moved toward it. The ruins of carbon fires in tiled ovens. The smell of chilis, toasted cornmeal, and garlic was fading in the kitchen. Heaving myself erect, I moved out of it and through a dining room and sala into the outer foyer. From there, a circular staircase led upward.
As I stepped into the foyer, I collided with someone standing motionless in the dark stairwell. He grunted in surprise. I was strung up so high that I opened up on him with demoniac fury. Blading fingers into his eyes and throat; jerking knees up into his groin. The guard groaned “annnh …,” an animal sound that filtered through the smashed bones in his neck, and fell. I snatched the carbine from his hands and dropped on top of him. When he groaned again, I clipped the back of his neck with the butt of the carbine and he stiffened.
For what seemed a long time, I lay covering him, my right hand clamped over his slack mouth. I was listening. He stunk of chili peppers and unbrushed teeth, and his body began to sag into death. There was no sound inside the dark villa. Outside, distantly, I could hear waves crashing on the stony beach far below. A few nightbirds called harshly, curvetting away into the wind.
When I was sure that my unseen friend was a corpse, I unclamped my hand from his mouth and moved noiselessly toward the spiral staircase.
The second floor was lighted by an estrella-shaped farol. Its dim radiance went down the adjoining hallways for only a few feet. I hesitated on that landing, because I might be leaving another ambush behind if I went on up. We knew that the only person in the world murderous Johnny Matar feared, outside of the dictator himself, was a huge Mexican wife. A termagant with a short fuse, who might be sleeping anywhere in the house.
But I hadn’t come to see her, so I went on up, cautiously, to the third floor. There was another dim, starshaped light fixture over this landing, and the hallway leading to the left had several night lights built into the walls.
At the end of the hall, subdued lights were burning in an apartment over the sea side of the house. I moved toward it, stopping when the winds buffeted at the outside blinds with a slatting sound, and could finally make out an anteroom filled with dark, carved furniture. Incense was burning somewhere, and I flattened against the wall as I approached the first lighted room to the right.
It was a master bathroom with three arches of black glass, leading to a sunken tub of black marble. Recessed in a niche above the tub was a life-sized black-glass panther, and the plumbing fixtures were golden gargoyles. The far door opening off this Lucullan retreat was partly opened, and I stepped silently across the black-tiled floor toward it.
That room was even more remarkable. A huge bedchamber with hand-tooled leather walls, the room was dominated by a four-poster mahogany bed with potbellied Buddhas carved on top of each post. The doors to the room, on the inside, were framed by massive beams fluting to pagoda tops. One concealed light, set somewhere up in the carved fretwork of the bed, put a faint patina on these architectural delights.
It also fell across Major Matar, who was drowsing against the large silken bolster with his right arm around a sleeping boy who could not have been more than fifteen. Matar’s eyes were hooded; he wore no wig on his huge head, and his shrunken body was half covered by a woman’s scarlet negligee. The naked brown boy murmured in his sleep, and the big head turned toward him solicitously. The long arm tightened in reassurance.
I freed the pistol and stepped into the room. When I did, the brooding villa exploded with jangling bells and screaming sirens, and every light in the house and on the grounds went out. Whatever I had tripped had activated a master-switch cutoff somewhere, and I had only a glimpse of Matar diving into darkness. Both my shots thudded into the big mattress, and I reversed through the Byzantine bathroom and went racing back down the dark hallway.
At the stairway landing, I was ready to plunge downward when lights started flashing on all over the second floor. That meant up, but I couldn’t find any way except through the large window on the sea side. To the roof. Snatching its blinds level and up, I stepped out on the terrace and fumbled at the cords. From the outside, it took an agonizingly long time to get the blinds rattled down again.
I edged back along the narrow terrace toward Ma-tar’s apartment. He would certainly figure me to try the downward route. As I moved along, I realized what had happened. Those ankle-high night lights I had been passing had turned into a photoelectric cell at the edge of Matar’s inner sanctum. At the far end of the terrace, I stood waiting.
Listening, and staring down into the frightening abyss below me. It went all the way to the beach, hundreds of feet below, but was not far enough over the water to risk a dive.
Inside the villa, I could hear muffled shouts, and feet pounding along the halls. The graveled area in front of the garages, far below, flared up brightly as day and the smooth lawns were flooded by spotlights. I stepped up onto the windowsill of Matar’s apartment, and caught the rain gutter. Drew myself up slowly and anxiously, fearing the damned thing might break loose.
The roof was pitched and graveled, its wings broken by slanting skylight windows. Most of them were opened, and I crept along until I found the one above the third-floor landing. Kneeling beside it, I saw Matar rushing up the stairs, skinny legs pumping inside the negligee. His face was contorted with rage, and when his naked recent bed-partner ran down to comfort him, Matar slapped the boy completely off his feet. Came lunging on up.
I had only a few seconds to make up my mind. Matar would try to keep this invasion of his privacy a secret, for a while. He would first try to search me out, kill me, and consign my body to the shattering cliffside fall, as he had done for so many others. But if he could not do it quickly, he would call in troops; have the whole estate and house searched inch by inch. And I was on top of the villa, with no way out.
I gauged his progress as he came up the stairs swinging his machine pistol in one fist, and lowered myself through the skylight. He was almost to the landing when I struck him like a projectile, knees gathered and feet together. His spine and neck must have snapped at the moment of impact, because I weigh 208 pounds, and it was all falling inert. His body bounced backward, bones cracking, and he went hurtling down the stairway.
I took a hell of a banging up, too, but mine was recoil. Struggling up, I followed his lifeless body down the stairs. On the second floor I netted his obese, heavily mustached Mexican wife, who cursed me with a fine mestizo flavor, and two cringing Hispaniolan maids. Herding them before me, I found the naked boy paramour frantically trying to start a black Continental in the garage, and cuffed him into the group.
Besides the Continental, there were a gray Cadillac and a red Volkswagen bus inside the garage. When I had my four prisoners back up on the second floor, I tore several bed coverlets into strips and made them lie on the floor while I bound them tight enough to last’;til Gabriel’s trump. While I was doing this, Matar’s mountainous Mexican wife spat in my face twice, so I tied her fat ass tight enough to last until two days after Armageddon.
It took another quarter hour for me to find all the light panels, but finally I had all the outside floods switched off and the telephone lines disconnected. When that was done, I started a systematic search of the villa. There was a den on the first floor, off the entrance foyer, but it showed few signs of use. When I opened the circular wall safe behind the Hispaniolan landscape, another alarm went off, but I quickly snipped the connecting wires and silenced it.
The contents of the safe were what I might have expected. Deeds, leases, legal documents, export-import records; nothing bearing on my search.
The second floor seemed to belong to the fat Mexican virago. I covered it carefully, and when I was in the bedroom where the captives lay bound, turtle-like, Señora Matar tried to rock her bulk up high enough to spit at me again. I stood a few feet away, watching her enormous effort with appreciation. It failed. She only fouled her own hirsute chin with saliva, and I bowed to her and went up the stairs.
Matar’s sanctum was my main hope, but nothing in its eerie pink light helped. Nor did the other two guest bedrooms and baths on the floor. I was sitting on the edge of the Buddha-headed bed, looking around for a final inspection, when I noticed the tremendous conch shell that had served him as a soap dish in the niched lavatory.
There was soap in it, or at least on its flaring lip of pink nacre. Something, something…. Even in that rococo bower of homosexuality, there was a lot of wasted space in that soap dish. I picked it up and knocked the soap out. The twirled shell rattled, and it wasn’t the murmur of the sea. Two rolls of film came out in my hand when I held the shell upside down, and I felt an odd satisfaction as I stood juggling them.
Pornographic films, I told myself. Not believing it, however, because Matar hadn’t tried to secrete the financial records I had found in the wall safe on the first floor. They weren’t even coded. The films in the conch shell were the first secret things I had found in the house of the sadistic little man with the big head. I dropped them into my pocket and went down to the second landing of the stairway again.
Major Matar was still lying there, crumpled. His body didn’t weigh much. I carried it downstairs to the garage, put it in the back of the red Volkswagen bus, and covered the meager corpse with a dark tablecloth I found in one of the kitchen drawers. The little red bus was famous in Hispaniola as a death wagon. It was also the vehicle in which Matar delivered the virgin-of-the-day to the Generalíssimo’s Palace every afternoon.
I was banking on two things. One, Matar’s aides often drove the car for him; and, two, if I slumped in the seat to conceal my height, the gaudy purloined garrison cap with the huge visor would tend to reduce even so noble a face as mine to a cipher.
I backed the red bus out of the garage, and looked up at the villa wrapped around the headland: It appeared exactly as it had when I surveyed it from the cover of the fir hedgerow. Only a few lights at the top. My automatic pistol and Matar’s Swedish machine pistol were beside me on the front seat, and I turned the bus around through the whispering gravel and drove it down the curving driveway toward the sentry station at the gate. Both weapons were snapped off safety; I had only to grab them and start firing.
